In our public-facing website environment we resolve URLs via our gateway to a hardware load balancer, and then on to our web front-end SharePoint 2010 servers. This all works well, and externally we can resolve www.mydomain.com. Internally however, I wanted to resolve the same URL to my internal IP addresses without having to hack hosts files or make other nasty changes.
This can be done via Windows 2008 DNS server when creating a default primary authorative zone. Normally you would create a zone for mydomain.com and then add a host entry for “www”. This would however have the effect that the DNS server became authoratative for the entire mydomain.com domain, which I did not want as there are other mydomain.com addresses that our environment does not host.
The solution is to create a primary DNS zone matching the full URL, www.mydomain.com.
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DNS primary zone entry
Then, you create a blank A record pointing to the internal IP address of your website:
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Create a blank A record
This A record becomes the default entry for the zone, so internal requests for www.mydomain.com will resolve to your A-record, but any requests for other URLS in the mydomain.com space will be forwarded via normal DNS processes.
Image may be NSFW.
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Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
